CAR AT CURBSIDE - FOREVER

115. CAR AT CURBSIDE - FOREVER

And someone one day said "I can't make any sense anymore out of what I'm doing" and I replied "why should you ? or have you ever?" and five days later that guy was dead - leaving in his wake a hundred questions I should have asked him back and we all moped around for a few days while people tried figuring what went wrong and when someone finally did show up for him and had a wake and stuff we each went - singly but as a group - and mutely managed a procession through the very dour funeral room and that was the end of it - I suppose eventually there was a church service or something but I never even really found out where they took him or where he ended up - it may have been far away for all I know Ohio or something because all he was really was a temporary presence here and in my life one of those determined students who come forth from some other place in order to earnestly follow 'art' instruction and to fashion his or her given talent into directions they want but in this case it all turned out wrong and he ended up with no direction except home or wherever and I was sorry about that for a while but one thing about the big city is that you don't much notice these things when people come and go in fact I noticed and still do to this day more about inanimate things than I do about people and for a point of fact in these days I'm talking about there was always a really beat looking and sad old Hudson Hornet parked at the curb right in front of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and like Fifth Ave. and Tenth Street every day and it never seemed to move but was never ticketed either and it was a big fat low Hornet with old black paint going bad and the impressive Hudson Hornet logo on the side and I watched that car every day for all the time I passed it and I wondered too about its being and purpose and why it was there and who owned it and how they kept it and all the rest - probably actually the sorts of things I should have been asking myself about this Campbell guy who killed himself but it didn't much matter because (in this 'long' run now) both him and that car are long-time gone away and nothing I could do about either - or anyway that's how I felt - and I probably did actually care more about the car than I did about him (sorry to say).

THE JAZZ LOFT

114. THE JAZZ LOFT:

The 'jazz' loft was not much like the 'art' loft - for one thing the jazz loft was always dark and crowded and usually did stink of alcohol pot or sweat and it was often airless or stale while by contrast an art loft tried to thrive on light and spaciousness and if it held any odor at all it was the odor seemingly of a grand oily enticing vat of paint - fresh and splattered dried and caked - people in an art loft had a complete and different view of things and they went about things based on completion or work or achievement and values based on a tradition of color perspective density and content - and I'd been to both types lots of times and even making it more odd was the fact that many times (as in the case of Larry Rivers) the artist was also the jazz man with much less of that happening the other way around but whatever - the overlap made for interesting groups of intermingling people : late night jam sessions dense and thick with smoke and booze sex and fury and the jazz loft was used by choice more than the art loft for these sorts of groups and encounters - groups of men with their horns and equipment long extended and wild jam sessions people coming and going no organized sitting in any way and rotating session men in and out of the group - which eventually wound up playing for hours and hours with shifting alliances and personnel - and as hard to explain as it was it worked - stairways filled with hangers-on and people wanting entry but the crowd sometimes was too much and here and there it always seemed there were one or two blind men who ended up playing grand solos on saxophones or other horns and keyboard guys - often enough blind too - would bide their intensity and time away playing fills on one of the often two or three pianos in these lofts : all in all it was a remarkable and often sex-charged scene with women as much an integral part of the music as anything else simply by their sexuality and loose morals (let's say) long dark windows drab and moist with dewey sweat and stained by streaks of water-condensate rolling down and there were darkened alcoves and elevator areas and stairwell landings and mattresses here or there on the floor or in side rooms - people making out or fucking or talking excitedly together - it was just never known what I'd run across or into upon entering any of these scenes and it was as if some great billowing New York artworld nuclear blast had occurred and expanded light and energy over the entire island and most intensely in these lofts where people stayed all night and sometimes for days while others came and went and the great black resonating voices would cat-call back and forth all night to each other - jazz-inflected insults and jibes which kept much of the tension going and creatively added an element of frisson to the proceedings - occasionally there would appear someone from the music press or the greater jazz-world to stay awhile and listen or take part while others clapped or roared or got sick silently along some sidewall alone somewhere - and the passed-out dregs of all this would be left alone or cradled by someone else - all in all an intriguingly interesting scene and by far I'd have to say jazz lofts were wilder and crazier than artlofts - which by contrast held professors scholars and the utmost of gentility all swept along by the brush and broom of art's more graceful arc.

TEETERING BULBS OF DREAD AND DOOM

113. TEETERING BULBS OF DREAD AND DOOM:

'Patient inquiry ? isn't that my own confusion between some stupid hospital-doctor-questioning thing and the idea of questioning everything else?' as if that hokum joke was intended to startle audiences into existential laughter paroxyms of despair wails of wailing and doubt the preening solipsism of too much attendance at some county fair of the mind where the only elixirs which sell well are concoctions like 'Grandpa's Age-Old Remedy For Tyrannical Sleeping-Sickness and the Lies of Ancient Dogs' as if it all was meant for something and THE CROWD LAUGHED like Nero at his own fire and it went like that for days and the table-seated clown the guest-of-honor finally limped on stage and showed everyone his scars but when he pulled up his shirt he pulled up his skin and all anyone saw were his ancient organs stuffed in a gut fatter than Manfred's weasel 'DINNER AT SEVEN' I heard the nun say - wizened old wrinkled face truly a Mother Theresa in the making and just like the ULTIMATE IRONY is in seeing on a gravestone letters that read 'a true survivor' after the person's name any obsession with the picayune can drive crowds and crowns too quite MAD ('NO MORE NUMBERS - THE LETTERS NEXT TIME') : there he sat as accuser judge and jury all in one box Russell Edson all strange loops and tangled hierarchies in the mix and match book of fabulous farewells. [Good-Bye!]

ALWAYS SEARCHING OUT THE IDEAL SITUATION

112. ALWAYS SEARCHING OUT THE IDEAL SITUATION (NYC, 1967):

That which is a no-no in itself should serve as a fair warning for others not to do - I once saw a man so covered with hair that it was almost unnecessary for him to wear clothes and made no sense anyway caught as he was between two states for the clothes covered nothing which needed covering and the hair all over his body made the weight and covering of the clothes uncomfortable irritating and not needed but there was really no place for this man to be (except perhaps Barnum's old barn down by City Hall Park) and he was forever caught between two worlds - both actually filled with misunderstanding and hatred and anxiety as no one would leave him alone and no one liked him anyway : where could he go ? how could he work ? what was there to do for him except loll around vagrant and unwanted ? and even in New York City at Collect Pond Park where the bums hung out and which was surrounded by all the big stately buildings of governmental agencies and welfare and aid departments HE couldn't find a damned thing to get - there were no services open nor aid in any way for 'confused hairy men' which is how the stupid socialist governmental paperwork seemed to want to describe him SO as you see there really often isn't an IDEAL STATE anywhere in every meaning of the word and some other guy once says to me "as long as you can say 'I believe in women' you're OK and the world's not lost" and I said back - in this very spot - "that sounds like a fair proposition to me for they often have all the sizzle and grace of something wild you just have to taste" and he laughed and said I should write that down and be sure to become famous and then of course he asked for some money - but he had no stories attached so I gave him fifty cents and he was glad for that and I said "you know how come monkeys don't talk ? it's because they know that if they uttered a word some man would come and put them to work" which as I think back now was my elliptical way of saying I suppose 'why don't you get a job?' which is what most people used to say to bums and which he and they had probably already heard a million other times and far be it from me to pound another nail into that coffin and the short road from niggardly to abstemious isn't that difficult to traverse and anyway THAT particular winter was very cold (or as they used to say in WWII 'there was a little nip in the air') and I almost always was able to find something I liked for a while there - a good stretch of time was taking place even in my indigence - and I thought a lot also about that backstage job I'd been doing - unlike today all of that work as I said was then manual and not automatic and computerized and hands-off with micro-switch settings and auto-timers and stuff as it is now and at that time it was still all winches pulleys levers and ropes and most of the lighting controls and curtain stuff was real work and in a difficult way it was precise too : and I sometimes thought it was a lot like running an old sailing ship with graduated controls for the moonlight and the sunlight as if on the wide-open sea but when that job was over I wasn't ready to just take another one like it right away - there were opportunities because that sort of backstage lunacy is always available and always needs people but one thing that kept me away was all the stage-union stuff demands for membership and money meetings and joinings all in order to get references for other jobs and placements on job lists and all that commie/socialist bullshit which I couldn't stand - and every time I heard some bastard singing or dancing about 'Freedom' or any of that stuff on a stage or anywhere even the damned coffee-houses I'd start stewing again about all the Jew-bastard lies they peddle about social justice and equality and the ideal state and all that crap for really it was nothing except closed-shop power tactics run by fatcats who'd skim off the top the union dues and payoffs and mob connections and the entire entertainment bullcrap industry anyway was all Jew-laden fantasy just taking advantage of other people and fleecing audiences to with their sappy showtime crap and I really deep down wanted nothing to do with it.

ON THE RESERVATION

111. ON THE RESERVATION:

Bulgar wheat and the fine wailing of sopranos and mincemeat and rice and cornbread and coffee and the listing of old ships and the warriors on the sea and my father's last picture (in 1953) on New Year's Eve standing before his '47 Plymouth proud like a mountain lion and coaxing truth from some forgotten Bayonne rock and if he knew a foreign language to speak I know he would have spoken it just to say 'it is me and I am here and it is long ago BUT I am looking to the future and just as simply THAT IS THAT' and it's so insular and single all these things I do and I do them alone now left on earth without an other or a them and I wish for no disturbance to break my skin or utter forth from scabrous words the chants and likings of myth and the confabulated rhymes - and I run to Staten Island to see the new disease or I prance to southern Jersey to sense the mind of trees and water kept together but all I get are THESE : senseless messages from the dead a failing candle in an old loft window two dusty books written in by Mark Twain and a message from the doughboy in his uniform telling me what this death is really like - but I can see no edges except the girl who brings forth desire and when it alights upon my arm I do so desire whatever there is and she speaks softly back to me with one arm over the hem of the couch in velvet green 'don't listen for the sound and be more happy with silence as it comes from the grave' and with a shrug of my shoulders and a turn of my head I mention to her that all this talk of the dead really gives me the creeps and she smiles back JUST ONE MORE TIME to say 'on the reservation EVERYTHING like this is taken care of for you - you really ought to go.'

REVOLUTIONS ARE STAVED OFF

110. REVOLUTIONS ARE STAVED OFF:

If this is a dream I don't want to sleep and He maketh me lie down in still waters too but I turn my head and say back 'what kind of God is this IF IT IS that it needs the praise and the thanks of a pitiful OR an almighty mankind in order to reach its own satisfaction?' but nothing comes back except bland thunder and effortless words : 'I keep my heart in my own pants pocket' or the enfeebled cries of millions still yelping about their deaths and ALL of the Crimea writhes in anguish and a taxi driver steps out at the curb and drops down a valise of some sort which he'd carried out of the back seat as I watched and from across the other side of the cab comes an enormous fat man who grunts 'thank you' and hands him a few dollars as they pass and I hear the radio voice within the taxi saying loudly something about '96th and First - new fare passage to JFK' and the guy is off that quickly with the message still warbling and I get an image completely made up - having never made use of an airport yet - that shows me rows of yellow cabs and unmarked cars awaiting fares while people yell out names - often mistaken names - to whomever can hear and at once they all rush off to enter the cabs and the resultant pandemonium is only broken by the cackle and the babble of names and messages and destinations yelled out YET I'm sure that's not what it's really like because even in the midst of chaos there's always an order which takes over - no matter how artificial that order is - and that order is the basic premise of LIFE as we live it and there are specialties in every aspect of order PEOPLE who precisely step in and take over the parameters of their specialty which is I guess essentially why everything works or seems to 'work' in that amazingly small and deliberate way which society has about itself - efforts and proportions to make trains run and highways flow and planes and taxis go to and fro and waterways remain unclogged and systems and bureaucracies go about their meager work unknowingly silent and whether efficient or not getting a semblance of work done or enough of that work to keep people happy and that is how revolutions are staved off and systems made to flourish and flourish they do in spite of themselves too and the whole wide world with its servitude and false creeds just runs on as a mess of conflicting dogmas and all the incidentals of them - drawing men's allegiances and men's fears and wants and needs all the while world-spinning stars-shining the awesome cry of everything at once takes place and thrives and withers in time - that which we know and enforce and come to harbor anyway.

ONCE THE PAST

109. ONCE THE PAST...

Much of the key to knowledge and wisdom's enjoyment is in simple observation - there were still in NYC at this time through the 60's occasionally to be found remnants of items and places dating from the 1920's - old tiled bathrooms rich with porcelain and mosaic and glazed tile exquisite with decoration and filigree large fixtures huge urinals and toilets with open spaces and areas fit for the space of palaces and kings and they brought forth amazing relics of ideas from some recent antiquity that were still hard to come by and imagine too - these things have for the most part now disappeared or have been lessened remodeled modernized scrunched into closet-sizes with the poorest and most utilitarian of fixtures and means - a much paler reflection of the human mind and where once a person could revel in the sumptuous city-sized glories of the great commonweal of mankind now everything is cramped and pressured by comparison but NO MATTER for that is the way of lucre and flesh - man making the most of matter and time - but what is missed is the simple height which this grandeur brought forth the 'elevation' of the human moment and even the Automats - as simple and efficient as they were meant to be - represented something else : a far different sense of space and manhood with wide open ceilings vast spaces of tables and glass and open-areas within which a person could eat muse spend time or nurse coffee for as long as the time allotted went forth - into thought into magic into the relic of other moments and densities of time - small change clinking down the change-chute trays sliding along and the clack-slap of each little glass and chromium window dispensing foods and pastries - minor meals meant to live by but not treasure and the momentary exchange of a few small coins for something to do was immensely satisfying and (for such as me) as broadening and mind-opening as any university's summer food-lounge could be and every wastrel or bum or lost soul - taken to heart - was a professor worth the salt of any other exalted windbag would ever be worth that salt : words and lessons exchanged complaints and all the plaints and woes that diminishing lifetimes could bring.
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